Pre-Samnite was an ancient language spoken in southern Campania, in Italy. The name Pre-Samnite refers to the fact that the language was spoken in early times in an area that was later colonized by Samnites, who spoke Oscan.Sabellian Languages, R. E. Wallace, in The Ancient Languages of Europe, Ed. R. D. Woodward. Pre-Samnite is recorded in a few short inscriptions dating from around 500 BC. The language belongs to the Osco-Umbrian group of languages, and may be closely related to Oscan, but shows a number of archaic features which were lost from Oscan.Sabellian Demonstratives: Forms and Functions, Emmanuel Dupraz. However, the material is too scant to enable a precise determination of the relation of Pre-Samnite either to Oscan or to the other Sabellian languages.
Sample text The following text is a proposed reconstruction of a Pre-Samnite inscription found in Tortora:
The proposed translation for this text reads:
Another proposed reconstruction of the Tortora inscriptions reads: Another possibly Pre-Samnite inscription which was probably from Capua reads:
The original text was written in scriptio continua and in the Oscan alphabet.
References